It can be shown that such uplift as deduced from the
Rocky Mountains also occurred worldwide. Several
examples will be presented with a summary from Ollier
and Pain’s book, The Origin of Mountains.
12 The Atlas
Mountains of northwest Africa rose to a height of 4,167 m,
while some of the basins within and surrounding the Atlas
Mountains have sunk by at least this same amount.
13 All
this uplift occurred in the late Cenozoic.
14

The Mediterranean Sea basins, including the Pannonian
Basin of Romania and Hungary, developed mostly in the
Cenozoic.
15, 16 At the same time, the surrounding mountains
uplifted, many of which were overthrusted away from the
basins during extensional tectonics accompanied by much
metamorphism. The Cenozoic differential vertical tectonics
amounted to thousands of metres.

The mountains of south-central Asia, including theHimalayas, the Tian Shan, and the Zagros Mountains, aswell as the Tibetan Plateau, rose thousands of metres whilesurrounding basins sank thousands of metres. During thistime, tremendous erosion of the mountains piled up coarsegravel deposits up to 3,000 m thick, extending from theedge of the mountains and thinning toward the centre ofthe basins.
17 The coarse gravel is generally rounded bywater, and sometimes composed of boulders longer than
2 m. Gravel layers parallel to the mountains are sheet-like, hundreds of miles long. Figure 5 shows the sheetlike gravels in the Sichuan Basineast of the Tibetan Plateau. Allthis activity is dated to the lateCenozoic.
18

In southwest Asia, the Greater
Caucasus Mountains have risen
as much as 5,642 m while
the South Caspian Basin has
subsided around 27,000 m.
19, 20
The Alborz Mountains, Iran,
wrap around the southern part
of this basin and are believed
to have uplifted a significant
amount at the same time as the
South Caspian Basin subsided.
21
This tremendous differential
vertical tectonics of 32,600 m
all happened in the Cenozoic:
“The South Caspian basin
evolved adjacent to the rapidly
uplifting Greater Caucasus
Mountains since the Paleogene
[early Cenozoic]”.
22

Figure 1. Schematic of the uniformitarian view of the Precambrian granitic crust below Paleozoic and
Mesozoic Erathem sedimentary rocks in Wyoming at the end of the Mesozoic deposition and at present
(redrawn by Mrs Melanie Richard from Glass, G.B., and Blackstone, D.L., Geology of Wyoming, Information
Pamphlet No. 2, The Geological Survey of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, 1994, p. 3).

Figure 2. Beartooth Butte, 490 m thick, with marine fossils is an erosional
remnant on top of the Beartooth Mountains, south-central Montana and
north-central Wyoming.

Figure 3. Tilted Paleozoic and Mesozoic Erathem strata at the northwest
edge of the Bighorn Basin at Clarks Canyon adjacent to the southeast
Beartooth Mountains